Author Interview: Ross Payton (Zombies of the World)

Ross Payton, director of the horror comedy Motor Home from Hell, is also the podcaster behind Role Playing Public Radio and the author of two roleplaying books, Curriculum of Conspiracy and Road Trip. Most recently, he is the author of Zombies of the World, a social history of zombies and a field guide to twenty species of the living dead. “I kind of wrote it from the standpoint of a scientist who is very pro-zombie, but it’s not a very enlightened world,” he says. “Even the zombie rights activists are focusing on not shooting all the zombies.”

As you might expect if you have read Zombies of the World, Payton cites a wide range of influences for his work. “Obviously, films were a large part of it, but there were several real books,” he explains, covering the spectrum from Peter Dendell’s The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia through the stories of H.P. Lovecraft (whose characters are referenced throughout the book) to B,ullfinch’s Mythology and a 1904 text on Japanese folklore calledKwaidan. He also cites Japanese horror films and comics like The Walking Dead as inspiration. “I tried to touch all the bases,” he says. Some of those bases might be unexpected to the casual zombie fan. “One book that was an inspiration was called Dancing at Armageddon, and that’s a book, actually, about survivalists. I wrote a paper for a pop culture conference comparing the zombie genre to survivalists.” He adds “There are several books that I’ve read on zombies and pop culture and academia, and I can’t remember when I read them; it’s sort of an ongoing topic for me. “

Payton turned that enormous body of research and inspiration into a concise zombie field guide. “One of the first things I did,” he says, “was write a list of every potential monster I could call a species of zombie. Anything that was undead but not vampiric, I kind of used or thought about using.” Wanting to go beyond the dichotomy between fast zombies and slow zombies, he “started examining each of the common tropes you see in zombies” and put together a list of 20 species of walking (or hopping, or dancing) dead drawn from film, literature, and folklore from around the world.

In developing the fictional social and evolutionary history of his zombie species, Payton asked himself “If zombies were real, how would they be in the real world?” It turns out that “there’s actually a precedent in nature,” for zombies, and Payton can cite well-documented examples. “It’s pretty horrific,” he says enthusiastically. “There’s a type of fungus called cordyceps that infects insects, particularly ants, and what they’ll do is they’ll mind control the ant to alter its behavior to go to the highest branch possible so that it’s highly visible, so it can be eaten by something else, and that helps the fungus spread.” Zombies of the World, he conceptualizes zombies as a similar kind of parasite, and points out that “the zombie microbe, or whatever it is, is harmless until it has something to control.”

Such a parasite would not have spontaneously arisen out of nowhere. “They would evolve over time. You wouldn’t go from zero zombies to billions of zombies overnight, which is kind of the norm.” Too many zombie stories, in Payton’s opinion, “treat zombies as being outside of history. They show up en masse and nobody knows how to deal with them. If zombies were real, people would have incorporated them into their worldview, because that’s what they do, even with relatively extraordinary things.”

There are plenty of extraordinary things in Zombies of the World, and some are stranger than others. One of Payton’s more surprising creations is the Dancing Zombie, which he said is a nod to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” Payton explains that all zombies are psychologically motivated; they have no biological need to eat and cannot actually digest anything they consume, so the drive to feed on human flesh is purely psychological. He also cites the example of the Revenant, which “is psychologically motivated by the desire to murder, to get revenge. Why would their motivations all be murderous? Why wouldn’t there be essentially a harmless species with a desire so deeply ingrained into it that it wants to dance, to entertain us, to create art?”

In fact, despite the ravenous and deadly creatures cataloged in Zombies of the World, Payton reminds readers that humans are more likely to cause the “zombie apocalypse” than are the zombies themselves. “The zombie apocalypse would probably happen due to overreaction on our part, using nuclear weapons on a zombie-infested city, which would cause a cascading effect on the environment. You’d kill a few of the zombies, but you also destroy a whole city’s worth of infrastructure and resources, and you have a bunch of radioactive zombies now. When panic or bad decision-making happen, what can save you from that?”

That grim possibility is why he says zombies are enjoying such popularity in recent years. He traces the zombie genre’s history beginning with the debut of I Am Legend in 1954. “You have over a decade between that and Night of the Living Dead, and then you have Dawn of the Dead in 1978, and from 1978 to 2001 they’re kind of relegated to low-budget B movies,” which horror fans liked well enough but the general public was mostly unaware of. “It started changing in 2002 with 28 Days Later,” Payton says, and “then, of course, you have 2003, the Max Brooks survival guide, and everyone’s thinking about it.” That timing lines up in interesting ways with society’s history, according to Ross Payton.

Drawing on his own research on the survivalist movement, he explains that the idea of survivalists is that with “the right consumer goods, the right firearms, the right dry rations, and if they learned the right skills, they could survive a nuclear war with the communists. That was very popular in the 1980s,” he says, and in fact worried citizens were digging bomb shelters well before then. Survivalists “kind of died down with the fall of the Soviet Union and kind of bubbled up again in the Clinton era” with events like the Branch Davidian incident, Ruby Ridge, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. The parallel Payton draws is that during these periods of identifiable threats, the zombie genre remained relatively obscure.

“The finale of it is the Y2K thing; they freak out about that and then realize that wasn’t going to happen. A lot of people still have these insecurities about living in this world, but there’s no convenient Soviet Union to be afraid of.” Two years later, 28 Days Later revived zombies in the popular imagination.

In the contemporary age, society faces “vague amorphous fears” and “nebulous threats” like terrorism and epidemic disease. Payton says zombies provide a useful outlet for these fears. “You aren’t crazy if you’re a zombie apocalypse fan, because everyone knows it’s a joke. It’s a way of indulging or massaging those insecurities without being a conspiracy theorist. People think it’s relevant because people don’t necessarily think zombies are going to show up anytime soon, but yeah, society is unstable.”

In the face of that instability, zombie stories are almost comforting in at least one way. “Zombies are a cozy catastrophe; it wipes out the world, but there’s no inconvenience to it. The mall is still there.”

Fortunately, so are the bookstores, because Ross Payton is writing a novel set in the Zombies of the World universe. “Writing a novel is a totally different beast,” he says. “Writing one narrative as opposed to a bunch of shorter standalone chapters is a very different process.” Entitled Dead Power, the story is set in “a scientific research facility, and they have all these zombies that they’re studying. One group of the zombies gets loose, obviously. The government is going to bomb the island unless the human staff and some of the intelligent zombies work together. The Talking Zombies are very untrustworthy because they’re addicted to human flesh, and they want to eat your brains, but they’re smart enough to realize that if they eat the humans, they’ll be bombed, and they won’t survive. They work together, and they survive the airstrike.” Dead Power should be available in the spring of 2012.

As for his own favorite undead literature, Payton says “of course, there’s I Am Legend and of course there’s World War Z. I did read a steampunk zombie novel, Boneshaker, by Sheri Priest; it’s very good, and I enjoyed that quite a bit. His favorite zombie movie, he states, is easily Night of the Living Dead. “I saw that as a kid; this was the first movie I saw period as a kid that had such a dark ending. Every human character dies in it. It’s so primitive; it’s like you’re watching surveillance footage somebody smuggled out, a home movie, not a real movie. I didn’t realize movies could be like that.”

Payton observes that “the zombie is a great monster for a lot of different reasons. It shows what we are when the rules of society and civilization break down, and they show us what we’ll be sooner or later- we’ll be dead.”

To see more of Ross Payton’s work, including a web series based on the book and a Zombies of the World blog, or to order copies of Zombies of the World, visit zombiesoftheworld.com.

An unedited transcript of the interview is now posted on One Day at a Time.

Irish burials trace link between zombies and disease outbreaks to Middle Ages

A recently announced archaeological find in Ireland indicates that the association between epidemic diseases and the undead is not a recent development.

Archaeologists from the Institute of Technology in Sligo, Ireland and the University of St. Louis excavated, from 2005 to 2009, a burial site dating from the eighth through fifteenth centuries at Killeasheen, County Roscommon, Ireland. Recently they released some of their findings concerning the 137 skeletons so far excavated at the site, including two so-called "deviant burials" from the eighth century. The two adult males were found buried alongside each other but had apparently been interred at different times in unrelated incidents. Both skulls had large stones in their mouths, which appear to have been placed there deliberately at the time of burial (Discovery News, IT Sligo). Placement of heavy objects such as bricks or stones in the mouth is a well-documented burial treatment for those considered at risk of returning as hungry and dangerous undead, though until the latter part of the twentieth century, the evidence for the practice was written rather than archaeological (Discovery News, IT Sligo, National Geographic News).

The younger of the two men "had an even larger stone wedged quite violently into his mouth so that his jaws were almost dislocated," according to Chris Read of IT Sligo. Such application of force seems indicative of strong emotion or motivation- fear, anger, or sheer grim determination. What could so strongly motivate someone to thrust a large stone into the mouth of a corpse with such force? Researchers have reason to believe the answer is self-defense. The two men may have been suspected of being revenants.

A revenant, according to Judyth A. McLeod, author of Vampires: A Bite-Sized History, is a medieval form of "wandering undead, ghouls, creatures of the dark, often but not always blood-sucking, and widely believed to spread the plague as well as attack the living." "Revenant" was a more general term, as the distinction between more specific types of undead with unique characteristics did not arise until later in the medieval period; both zombies and vampires, as well as the less commonly referenced ghouls, originated in beliefs about revenants. Dr. Dorothy King of PhDiva suggests that because of how they were buried and where they were found (far from the eastern European origin of the vampire legend) these two individuals are most likely "Zombies in the modern parlance."

In the modern parlance, zombies are usually portrayed as plague victims themselves, mindlessly driven to spread the contagion. In medieval Europe, as now, popular culture linked the risen dead with the spread of epidemic disease. Germs would not even be proposed as a cause of disease until 1546, and germ theory would not be widely accepted until the nineteenth century, so folk explanations were the only means available to most of Europe's population to understand and attempt to combat the plagues that intermittently ravaged the continent for much of the Middle Ages. The dead were frequently blamed for the spread of plague and other misfortunes that befell the living; many of those believed to be likely to return from the grave were societal outsiders in some way, or those who had died in particularly unpleasant or undignified ways, who may have borne a grudge against the living community (McLeod, PhDiva).

In some cases, the undead spread contagion by biting- a common feature of both zombie and vampire legends- and in others the undead spread the plague "magically" by chewing on his shroud (Discovery News, National Geographic News), which may be an example of sympathetic magic in which the shroud already within reach of the corpse's teeth replaces the flesh of the living. The dead could also spread plague by the passage of their rotting and diseased forms through the air at night; in the case of one medieval English revenant, "it was concluded that 'the atmosphere, infected and corrupted by the constant whirlings through it of the pestiferous corpse, would engender disease and death to a great extent" (McLeod). The latter explanation seems to venture closer to an understanding that decomposing corpses, especially those infected with disease-causing bacteria, can spread disease themselves, a realization which eventually led to sanitary practices that helped mitigate the effects of plague outbreaks.

Action had to be taken to prevent the spread of plague, attacks on the living, and general disruption of the natural order of things (which dictates that the dead should remain politely in their graves). Methods vary and include binding of the wrists and ankles in a face-down burial, beheading the corpse and stuffing the mouth with rocks and dirt, dismembering and burning the corpse, and simply stuffing a large stone into the mouth (McLeod, PhDiva). A large stone in one's mouth should prevent biting or chewing. It may also have acted as a spiritual barrier preventing the return of the deceased at all, given that "the mouth was seen as a key part of the body for such a transformation" according to Read, the orifice through which the spirit left the body and could perhaps return to it (Discovery News). Such focus on the mouth in early undead folklore may explain why the zombies, ghouls, and vampires that eventually developed from those medieval revenants are so defined by biting and consuming the living.

The archaeological team at Killeasheen estimates that the site may contain approximately three thousand more burials (Discovery News, IT Sligo), so perhaps it will yield additional insight into attempts to restrain the living dead.

DISCLAIMER: The author does not encourage any reader or member of the public to get close enough to a zombie or suspected zombie to insert any object into its mouth. Any attempt to replicate zombie neutralization techniques discussed in this article is strictly at your own risk.

Zombie Communication Studies

For all the bleeding-hearts who still think we can reason with the zombie hordes, there is new evidence that you may be on to something. Apparently the zombie virus leaves more of the brain's language center intact than researchers previously realized, and the folks at Survive the Apocalypse have put together a handy translator for those insane enough to try talking to the living dead.

Pronunciation is key. With slightly different inflections and stresses, "Ggrrrrr raaaaaar raaaaaar GRRR GRRR ahhhhh!!" ("Excuse me, you dropped your leg,") becomes "Ggrrrrr raaaaaar raaaaaar GRRR GRRR ahhhhh!!" ("Don't run. Let's talk this out over dinner"). Did you catch the difference? The fourth "a" sound in raaaaaar should be a short vowel for "me"; a long vowel turns it into "run."

Please note that it remains the professional opinion of the staff at Infected! that firearms are still the best way to communicate with any zombie.

Zombie Book Review: Newsflesh, by Mira Grant

The best zombie story I have ever seen begins with FEED, set in 2040. It is twenty years after the Rising, the initial and catastrophic outbreak of the Kellis-Amberlee virus that caused the dead to rise again (with an appetite for living flesh). The world survived, but society and culture have been forever altered by fear of the infection.

The novel is narrated by news blogger Georgia Mason (named after George Romero, like many of her generation) and follows the adventures of her crew- her brother Shaun (an unconfirmed Shaun of the Dead reference) and their colleague Buffy (seriously)- on the presidential campaign trail with a surprisingly respectable candidate, Senator Peter Ryman. Along the way, there are zombies, explosions, conspiracies, and witty dialogue.

From the opening scene through the ending, FEED is a captivating, exciting, fascinating, and compelling read.

The best books tell a great story and use it to explore interesting ideas. It's common enough for zombie literature to be used as a medium for discussion of social issues and underlying societal fears, and the Newsflesh trilogy does that brilliantly, taking on not just government control and the trade-off between freedom and security, but tackling the sociology of fear itself.

More overtly, the way that Grant used the fictional post-Rising world to explore the very real rise of online media was unique and fascinating. The books are about blogging and online media as much as about zombies. The focus on bloggers and online news gave Grant's social commentary a fresh, current, and relevant perspective.

In the author interview at the end of FEED, Mira Grant expresses displeasure with zombie stories that offer no further background on the zombie plague than noting that it was a disease. She did her research for this book; if her writing itself did not make that abundantly clear, the long list of highly qualified people in various fields in her two-page Acknowledgments certainly should.

Grant put together a unique, plausible, and utterly terrifying model for the zombie virus. In the vein of The Omega Man and I Am Legend, she worked from the premise that the Kellis-Amberlee virus had been developed as a cure for other things entirely and turned out to have unintended and horrific consequences; in an entirely unique twist, she designed a virus that was endemic in its dormant form in nearly all mammals over 40 pounds but amplifies into active (zombie) state when the host either dies or is exposed to active virus (bitten, for instance). Grant’s idea is novel, and her application of it is incredible.

Sequels occasionally disappoint, but DEADLINE follows through with more of the complex, believably real setting of the United States after the Rising, the intelligent, plausible virus scenario, the dynamic and memorable characters, and the engrossing, well-paced story and compelling, strikingly real characters.

Mira Grant's work has arguably earned its place near the top of the genre, and room on the shelf among the greatest zombie literature yet written.

The first and second books in the Newsflesh Trilogy, FEED and DEADLINE, are available now. BLACKOUT, the third and final installment, is due in bookstores in May of this year.

Zombie Origami

My super-awesome husband surprised me with a really cool book a while back- Zombigami: Paper Folding for the Living Dead by Duy Nguyen.


Duy Nguyen's book of zombie-inspired origami patterns, Zombigami, includes basic origami instructions and thirteen patterns for creating macabre undead art.

We acquired a pack of really pretty origami paper (the book comes with a packet of paper in the back, but we decided we wanted extra paper to practice with first), and we sat down to create some rather colorful zombies.


The first pattern in the book is entitled "Skull Crusher," and turns out to be a zombie head moaning in protest with its eyes bugging out as you cleave its skull with an axe. The skull and the axe are separate pieces that you're supposed to glue together; the head was easier to fold than I expected, and the axe was comparatively a little tricky. Ours both turned out a bit different from each other and from the picture in the book, but apparently they work just fine.

Other patterns include a severed hand still trying to grasp for a living victim; a staggering zombie with folded-paper intestines spilling out; and a host of other zombie characters.

The finished products are a bit stylized and abstract, as expected from folded paper, but chillingly evocative, and the book includes tips for customizing each zombie with as much detail as desired using markers and/or additional origami modifications.

Zombigami offers a good introduction to origami for beginners and a novel twist for more experienced paper-folders. It does vary slightly from strictly traditional forms, since it involves small amounts of cutting and gluing, where traditional origami uses only folding. Of course, avulsed entrails, skull-cleaving axes, and reanimated corpses are not exactly traditional pieces, which is part of the unique fun of Zombigami.

The book includes a packet of fifty sheets of origami paper specially printed to accompany the zombie projects, in a convenient pocket in the inside back cover. Purchasing more origami paper (which is available at Hobby Lobby, Michael's, or any similar craft store) or cutting out six-inch squares of notebook paper or plain typing paper to practice on first is probably a good idea, and since the patterns themselves are reusable, you can also buy extra paper to make as large a zombie horde as you want.

The Zombie Apocalypse as Deconstructive Literature

The English word apocalypse comes, via Latin, French, and then Middle English, from a Greek word apokálypsis, meaning "uncovering" or "lifting of the veil." Thanks mostly to the context of its appearance in the Book of Revelation, modern connotative usage typically associates apocalypse with the end of the world; actually, the apocalypse itself was not that event, but its revelation to John.

The best zombie apocalypse stories are inherently revelatory. As author Robert Kirkman writes in the introduction to The Walking Dead, Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye:

"Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society... and our society's station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too... but there's always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness."

The literature of disaster in general relies on the breakdown of infrastructure as a significant element. These major changes in environment and social structure provide a good vehicle for exploring how people interact and how society functions in the absence of established order. The stress of crisis is revelatory on an individual and a societal level; a familiar adage claims that crisis brings out the best and the worst in people, but what crisis actually does is reveal their real nature.

Stripping away the superficial layers of a culture can reveal things about that social structure through the act of deconstructing it. The result is a literature of deconstructive discourse like that in the latter chapters of the 2006 novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, which author Max Brooks uses to explore how modern Americans respond to the loss of the highly technical, sedentary, comfortable culture most took for granted until the dead began to walk and the pandemic stressed the world's infrastructure past functioning. In examining the loss of the infrastructure, superficial culture, and social order most people take for granted, zombies and other disasters reveal how much of that superficial culture is artificial and not necessarily in humanity's best interest.

Much of zombie film and literature is explicitly focused on the revelation of a deliberately concealed truth. In Mira Grant's novelFEED, the characters themselves are journalists actively engaged in the pursuit of facts and the process of deconstruction, discourse, and critique. The Resident Evil video games and movies are centered on the characters' process of learning the truth about the outbreak and their role in it. This tendency reveals something interesting about the mindset underlying modern culture, since this zombe literature historically seems to tap into underlying cultural anxieties; pandemic disease is an obvious source, along with hubris and misuse of science and technology, but this focus on secrecy and conspiracy is interesting and rather telling.

In a genre very concerned with truth and its concealment and revelation, the most important revelation of all is that the veil existed to be lifted.

Leave your shotgun and clean blood test at the door.

Welcome to Infected!

What do we mean when we claim to be a zombie culture blog with "brrrrainnns?" We mean that Infected isn't just another shotguns vs. chainsaws zombie survival guide. Originally spawned as a "Zombie Culture" page on Examiner.com, Infected is all about the culture of the zombie phenomenon, from book/movie/game reviews to the cultural history of the zombie myth to occasional epidemiological debates.

Infected updates once a week, unless HQ has been overrun by the undead, which may cause delays- but the resultant post will be totally worth the wait.

I'm your resident zombie culture expert; who better to provide all the latest insightful zombie culture commentary than an anthropologist who used to work at a funeral home and spends too much time in cemeteries?